Easing keyframes

Easing keyframes is the easiest way to start playing around with temporal…interpolation, because when you play with easing, as we will see in this movie,…After Effects kind of does the work for you.…I am going to go back to this Explore California logo, and it's really cool.…We animated it, all great and everything.…But now that we know a little bit more about temporal interpolation, we could…start to see that this is a little bit robotic.…Everything kind of animates on a very linear way.…In other words, the motion, the velocity is constant.…

There is no change in speed as we saw with that cool arrow in the last movie.…So, what we are going to do is we are going to this hill and we are going to…make it so that it comes on little bit faster and then slowly comes to a stop.…So, we are going to go to the Front Hill layer-- that's layer 8-- and push U.…That's the keyboard shortcut to reveal all the keyframes.…And that will show us our two keyframes.…Now, when you see the keyframes that are diamonds, that is linear…

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Author

Released

4/30/2010

In After Effects CS5 Essential Training, author Chad Perkins discusses the basic tools, effects, and need-to-know techniques in Adobe After Effects CS5, the professional standard for motion graphics, compositing, and visual effects for video. The course provides an overview of the entire workflow, from import to export, as well as detailed coverage of each stage, including animating text and artwork, adding effects to compositions, working in 3D, and rendering and compressing footage. Exercise files are included with the course.

Topics include:

Understanding the After Effects workflow

Precomposing footage

Explaining the basics and beyond of animating

Creating glows, patterns, textures, and more with effects

Color correcting footage

Working with text

Manipulating video playback speed

Masking objects and shape layers

Removing backgrounds with keying

Compositing multiple pieces of footage

Integrating After Effects with the rest of the Creative Suite

Skill Level Beginner

8h 39m

Duration

2,795,500

Views

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Q: In the "Creating a fireball" movie in Chapter 6, the author showed how to make a fireball. Unfortunately, it all centered around a blob layer that he made without showing how to make a blob layer. How does one go about creating a blob layer like the one used in the video?

A: To create a blob layer, make a shape layer using the Pen tool. Animate the anchor points over time to make it move. These concepts are reviewed in depth in Chapter 4, "Learning to Animate."

Q: In the Chapter 5 video "Understanding precomposing," the exercise file provided does not seem to match up with the file the instructor uses. My file does not include a "Biker Body" layer. Is there an error in the exercise file?

A: Unfortunately, the exercise file originally distributed for this chapter was incorrect. A new file was issued in February 2011. If you downloaded the exercise files prior to then, you can download the corrected file on the Exercise Files tab of the course page.

Q: How do I transition from one piece of animated type to another in After Effects?

A: There isn't an effect that can create these types of transitions. It's really a matter of animating the type and camera, using basic keyframing and positioning.

If
you understand the basics of moving the anchor point of a type layer,
animating the parameters of that layer (Scale, Rotation, Position,
etc.) and then separately animating the camera around the type layers, you
can achieve different types of transitions. Check out the following videos for more information: